I hope no one from Australia's various intelligence agencies is reading this, or they may be affronted. But for me, Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene's purported black comedy about an ingenious vacuum cleaner salesman deceiving Britain's MI6, has a marvellous ring of verisimilitude.

Indeed Greene, who worked for the spy agency for a while, got the idea from agents in wartime Portugal sending back to Germany completely fictitious reports which earned them expenses and bonuses to complement their salaries. Not only did his novel presciently anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis four years later, but also other spectacular intelligence failures such as the missing weapons of mass destruction behind the second Iraq war.